ABSTRACT
As is well known, there is a classical fairy-tale canon in the Western world that has been in existence ever since the nineteenth century, if not earlier. The tales that constitute this canon are “Cinderella,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Rapunzel,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” “The Frog Prince,” “Snow White,” “Bluebeard,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “The Princess and the Pea,” “The Little Mermaid,” “The Ugly Duckling,” “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp,” “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” and so on. In my previous works I argued that these tales became canonized because they were adapted from the oral tradition of folklore for aristocratic and middle-class audiences as print culture developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and basically reshaped and retold during this time to reinforce the dominant patriarchal ideology throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Consequently, the most telling or catchy tales were reprinted and reproduced in multiple forms and entered into cultural discursive practices in diverse ways so that they became almost “mythicized” as natural stories, as second nature. We respond to these classical tales almost as if we were born with them, and yet, we know full well that they have been socially produced and induced and continue to be generated this way through different forms of the mass media.
